The Company of Saints (16 page)

‘What does that mean?' he demanded. ‘Is it your crisp little way of telling me to get out for good, or are you going to be a human being and give us both another chance? For Christ's sake, we've been everything to each other. Davina, I'll accept all the blame you like, but don't throw our happiness out of the window like this. You've got your job and your principles, but at the end of the day you're going to need a man to love you. And I love you. You know that's true.'

‘Yes,' she said, ‘I do know it and I'm grateful. I'm grateful for the lovely times we had and for loving you. I did love you very much. You say you couldn't lose your business. All right, I'll accept that. But I couldn't give up my job to marry any man I didn't respect. That's what makes the job as special to me as your agency is to you. Integrity and trust. Those two things are what matter in the end. And it's better to be alone and keep them. Make your deal with the other side. Get them off your back, and I'll make it easy for you. I'll see the right version about our break-up gets back to them and lets you off the hook. Goodbye, Tony.'

He looked at her for a moment. ‘You're a fool,' he said slowly.

She heard him shut the front door. She picked up his glass and took it out to the kitchen to wash. For a few seconds the floor heaved under her as if she was on board ship. Then she heard the telephone ringing in the bedroom. It was the special phone connected to the switchboard in Anne's Yard. She ran to answer it.

‘Sorry to disturb you at a time like this,' Tim Johnson said. ‘I've got some top-level telexes in – I think you'll want to see them. I can bring them over to you if you like. Save you coming into the office.'

The floor had stopped moving under her feet. She pulled herself together. For God's sake come over, she nearly said, give me something else to think about.

‘How soon can you get here?'

‘Twenty minutes.'

‘Fine, I'll see you then.'

He was right on time; the front door buzzer went at exactly twenty minutes after the call. Davina pressed the entryphone button and opened the door.

‘These came in from West Berlin,' he said. ‘And that's the most important one – it ties up with the others.'

She sat down and read through the decoded telexes.

Sources in West Berlin reported rumours of an accident to the Soviet Foreign Minister in Poland. Davina was frowning. Warsaw airport was closed, and there was a news blackout. She looked up at Johnson. ‘Are they saying the plane crashed? This reads as if he was killed.'

She didn't expect an answer. She read the latest telex, from a source in East Berlin, a wholly reliable British intelligence cell that operated within the government itself. Nikolaev had reached Warsaw airport safely – the plane had radioed in after landing. On the way out of the airport his car was attacked. ‘An 84-mm anti-tank gun – good God, Tim!'

‘An ordinary car would've been snuffed out just like that.' He snapped his fingers.

‘They must have been mad,' Davina said at last. ‘This is the excuse Moscow's been looking for. This is a disaster. What's the Foreign Office reaction?'

‘About the same as yours,' he answered. ‘If this is Solidarity, they've committed suicide.'

‘Moscow'll keep it quiet till they decide on an official story. But it doesn't read quite right, does it? A rocket attack? That doesn't sound like Solidarity to me.'

Johnson chewed his lip. ‘What
does
it sound like to you?' Davina looked up at him. He had a shrewd, sharp face, the face of a predator.

‘I wouldn't like to put it into words,' she said. ‘Not till we know a little more. Where's Humphrey?'

‘Gone up to Norfolk,' he said. ‘With his friend.'

‘Well, ring through for me, will you, Tim?'

Humphrey had been expecting the call. He liked Ronnie's family. When he first met them, they'd been shy and awkward with him. Now he and the situation with their son was accepted. They looked on him as a kindly uncle who took care of their boy in London. He and Ronnie stayed at a pleasant local pub when they went up to see them. The visits were important to Ronnie. He had an affectionate nature and he loved his mother. He didn't want the family to think he'd gone grand and forgotten them.

‘Humphrey,' Davina said, ‘I'm sorry to break up your weekend. I've had to come back from Sussex myself. I think we should spend tomorrow on an analysis job. Monday will be hectic and we need the time. Do you mind?'

‘Not at all.' The pedantic voice sounded worse over the telephone. ‘Things always happen at weekends, don't they? How's your mother bearing up? Is she with you?'

‘No, she's staying with the Chief. She's not too bad, considering. Shall we say nine o'clock tomorrow?'

‘Nine o'clock,' he repeated, and rang off.

Johnson had lit a cigarette and was looking round. It was a pleasant flat, nice pieces of furniture, comfortable. Photographs on a table. Father and mother with a house in the background. Very much the manor type. And Davina with a man, taken somewhere on a beach. She looked young, laughing, with her arms round his shoulders. It wasn't Walden or his predecessor Colin Lomax. It must be the husband, Sasanov. He squinted at it, trying to focus better. Yes, definitely Sasanov. A big, square man with a Slav face. What an odd woman she must be, he thought. She certainly picks odd bedfellows.

‘I'm afraid that means Sunday for you.' Davina interrupted his thoughts. ‘And for Harris and Goodwin. We'd better ask Poliakov to come in too.'

‘If he's sober,' Johnson remarked. Serge Poliakov was a retired Russian watcher, a member of the old wartime team at Baker Street. He lived on a modest pension and supplemented it by writing articles for political weeklies. He had lived with the same woman for forty years, and they got drunk regularly together.

‘Given a bit of warning, he should be okay. I think that's it, Tim.' She stood up.

‘I'm very sorry about your father,' he said.

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘It was quick, and at least he didn't suffer.'

Johnson did something that was a surprise to himself. ‘If you've nothing better to do,' he said, ‘why don't you let me give you dinner? My wife's gone off to some Pony Club thing with the boys – they won't be back till late.'

Davina was going to say, no, it's very kind of you, but I'm – doing what? Staying alone here for the evening. The Boss Lady, looking at the four walls and the television, making a sandwich before she went to bed. And bed reminded her of Tony Walden.

‘That's very kind of you, Tim,' she said. ‘I'd like to go out, if you're free. I don't feel like being alone tonight.'

‘Good,' he said, and meant it. ‘Do you like Chinese?'

‘Very much,' she said. ‘I'll get you a drink and then we'll go.'

5

‘So far,' Humphrey Grant announced, ‘we've established no link between these three incidents. Venice and Paris
could
be connected, but Warsaw knocks the idea of a KGB conspiracy right out.'

‘It seems to,' Davina admitted. ‘Which leaves us with the possibility that three highly important political figures – certainly Nikolaev heads the list – have all been murdered by coincidence within the last three months. I don't know who's going to buy that!'

The head of the Italian desk spoke up. ‘I'm still confident that Modena will make a breakthrough.'

‘I'd share that confidence if I thought he was going to tell us about it,' Davina said. ‘But what makes you say that, Paul?'

‘Because there's no move to bring that girl Valdorini to trial. Modena's buried her. The papers have dropped it. Nobody cares any more. I think he's sweating her and he's had some spectacular success with terrorists before.'

‘In the meantime we all sit around wondering if there's a link or not and who's going to be the next,' Johnson interposed. ‘The SEDECE haven't broken any ground over the Duvalier killings, and now we have some joker loosing off with an anti-tank missile and blowing up Nikolaev.'

‘And will we ever know if they got the people who did it?' Davina asked Serge Poliakov the question. ‘Will we ever get the truth?'

Poliakov was as bald as a vulture; he was stooped and sinister as the carrion bird, in his dusty black coat and metal-rimmed spectacles balanced on his hooked nose. He had a hangover, but not a bad one. Forty years ago he had been one of the most brilliant analysts of Soviet activities in the intelligence world. Now he didn't care – he needed extra money and he was prepared to work on odd occasions.

‘We'll get the truth by looking at the lies they tell,' he answered. ‘It's been officially called an accident. A burst tyre at speed put the automobile out of control. In the crash that resulted, the Minister and two others were killed. The bodies are being flown back to Moscow and there will be a state funeral. If you want to understand that pack of lies, you will see that the East German report is true. Ministers, government and Party officials do not get assassinated in Russia. It does not happen. That's understood. They have heart attacks or die after an operation, or, like this one, they drive in a car and get killed in an accident. They are
never
murdered. That would make them vulnerable. They
never
commit suicide. That would make them unstable. Again, impossible.

‘But who did it? We'll only deduce that by what Zerkhov doesn't do. If there are no repercussions inside Poland, then the killing was not Polish-inspired. There will be scapegoats, of course, but what we have to look for is a major policy shift in Soviet–Polish relations. Personally, I don't think it will happen. Poland has declared a day of national mourning. There are no reports of arrests or activity against the extremists in Solidarity. That says something.'

‘What?' Davina demanded.

He loved an audience. ‘It says to me that they have caught the killers,' he said softly. ‘I'd be surprised if they even expected to escape. That is what you want your East Berlin source to find out,' he went on. ‘Who was captured and were they still alive? At that, point it should be possible to see if there is a connection with Franklyn and the Duvaliers. One thing has occurred to me though …' He paused and looked round at them. He managed to convey that he didn't think much of their combined powers of deduction. ‘In Venice the only contact was a young woman, a student. In Paris, apart from the servants, the only survivor was a young student, also a woman.'

Humphrey couldn't resist the chance to score off the old show-off. ‘My dear Serge, you're not suggesting that this is
feminist
-inspired?'

Poliakov regarded him briefly through his dirty spectacles.

‘It's their age, not their sex that interests me,' he said. ‘Young, under twenty-five, still at university or college. Middle-class background. The French girl has an alibi that can't be broken. The Italian is in one of their filthy prisons as dead to the outside world as if she were buried. She hasn't got an alibi. One of them is supposed to be guilty. The other is innocent. I think they are both guilty.' He looked at Davina. ‘While we wait for Zerkhov and Borisov to show us something, why don't you do something yourself, Miss Graham?'

‘About what?' she asked him. ‘And don't start suggesting any cowboy operation. We're not allowed to behave like your lot did during the war.'

Poliakov laughed. It was a rusty cackle that ended in a fit of coughing. His fingers were brown with nicotine stains. ‘You don't do it officially, but you can always get it done. Send someone after that lucky young lady in Paris. Put a little pressure on her.'

Davina didn't answer. She wasn't putting anything on record for Serge Poliakov. Not while he drank a bottle of vodka a day.

She turned to the man responsible for East Germany: Richard Littmann, of German parentage, a brilliant graduate who had worked with James White for nearly fifteen years. He ran the East German network and it was one of the most effective in the Warsaw Pact countries.

‘Can you get news of Nikolaev's killers?'

‘I think so,' he said. ‘But I don't want to put pressure on our contact. He'll come through as soon as he knows any more.'

‘Then there's nothing we can do till we hear,' Humphrey declared. ‘Except stop Hauser going to the opera. Surely the Foreign Office will see sense about that now.'

Davina said, ‘When you're dealing with people who can mount an attack on Nikolaev and bring it off, I don't know how the hell we can protect anyone. But I'll make the cancellation of that gala night our first priority. Gentlemen – thanks for coming in. And thank you, Serge. As always, you've been a great help.'

He smiled at her. ‘Think about Paris.'

She did think about Paris. She thought about it during that week, when the German President arrived and everyone's nerves were fraying with anxiety. The gala performance at the opera was not cancelled. The government, headed by a. Prime Minister who would have personally braved the assassin's bullet before backing down, refused to panic and worry their guest. It was said afterwards, when they were all breathing easily again, that there were more Special Branch in the audience than invited dignitaries.

The official visit lasted three days. Davina herself was a guest at the Mansion House dinner given by the Lord Mayor in honour of President Hauser. It was the night before her father's funeral. She was seated among senior civil servants. Those who knew what her job was watched her with interest. The wife of a senior secretary at the Foreign Office stared at Davina for some minutes, and then whispered to her husband, ‘Is she really head of the SIS? She looks too young. Rather striking, with that colouring.'

‘Striking isn't a bad description,' he whispered back. ‘She's one of these lethal career women, tough as old boots.'